I went away again, and this time while I was gone it was the man who suffered a coronary. This I learned from another neighbor after my return. Not long after the funeral, he told me, some relatives had come and taken the man’s mother away. Where to, he didn’t know. Most of her belongings were still in the apartment, though, and it was another month before the same relatives came and removed them. Soon after that a young couple moved in. I’ve never spoken to either of them, but I noticed recently that they are expecting a baby.

It shouldn’t have been too hard to find out my old neighbor’s new address, and that, I told myself, was precisely what I should do, and I should send her a note of condolence. But the relief I felt at discovering her gone was so great that I felt there was less shame in my keeping silent.

—

What are you going through? When Simone Weil said that being able to ask this question was what love of one’s neighbor truly meant, she was writing in her native French. And in French the great question sounds quite different: Quel est ton tourment?

VIII

My friend begins the most important conversation of our lives by asking if I’ve heard that Einstein’s private writings include several examples of racist stereotyping and that he was also an abusive husband. I tell her that I have and she says, So I guess there goes the theory of relativity.

I gamely chuckle and ask how she’s feeling. She looks bad to me, haggard and jaundiced, though probably not worse than the last time I saw her. New: a tremor in her hands, and from time to time just talking leaves her short of breath.

I did a very stupid thing, she says.

You’re allowed, I say—then immediately worry that she’ll think I meant because you’re dying.

She had agreed to do a radio podcast in which she would respond to questions about what it was like to be terminally ill. A social worker at the hospital had somehow got her to do it, she says, and she should have known it was a mistake. It had gone badly, she says, off the rails, as she put it, partly because she was in pain, and she was also light-headed from not eating, she said, she hadn’t been able to keep anything down that day, and she should have known how irritating the questions would be. Or, even if they weren’t truly irritating, how likely she’d be to find them so.

Too late to do anything about it now, she says glumly.

So what, who cares? I say—and again I wish I could unsay it, fearing that she’ll hear you’re dying.